Apple CEO Tim Cook Takes A Dig At The Android OS During The WWDC keynote

Today marks the first day of Apple’s WWDC conference held in San Francisco at Moscone Center West, you know the same place that a certain other and perhaps slightly cooler event takes place at the end of this month? Apple may be making some strides to play nicer with those of us on Android, but that isn’t stopping CEO Tim Cook from trying to apparently ruffle a few feathers by getting in some digs at its biggest competitor. This morning at the WWDC conference Cook made it a point to talk about the comparison between both mobile OS platforms and the percentage of users who are on the newest version of the software. He mentions that while 89% of iOS users have now adopted and updated to the newest version of the Apple controlled software which is currently iOS 7, Android users are basically still stuck in the stone age when it comes to software builds, stating that a “big” percentage of users are still on a version from four years ago. This is in reference to the 16.2% of users still running Gingerbread, while 60.8% are still on Jelly Bean and just about 9% of users are now running Kit Kat.

He also touches on the malware issue stating that Android makes up a total of 99% of the mobile malware market. According to F Secure who did a study on the percentage of mobile malware between all mobile OS platforms including Blackberry, Windows Phone, iOS and Symbian in addition to Android, from all of 2013 Android actually made up 97% of total mobile malware,(those figures could have certainly changed since the end of March when this report was published by Forbes)but what Cook fails to mention is that nearly all of that malware comes from unregulated and third party app stores from the Middle Eastern and Asian regions where Android is present. The actual percentage of mobile malware coming from apps that you can download via Google’s own official Play Store application is merely 0.1% according to F Secure.

It doesn’t surprise us that Apple and CEO Tim Cook would want to omit this truth, because lets face it Android looks worse if you only mention the big numbers like 99% of malware. The simple fact is that if you want to protect yourself from malware, just don’t download outside apps from third party or unsigned locations. Besides the typical slam attacks on Android Cook also mentions that half of all current iPhone users in China had switched from Android phones because they “wanted a better experience.” While this might be true, let’s not forget that China Mobile, who is the worlds largest mobile carrier reportedly had a huge push in favor of the iPhone, which surely had a big role to play in the iPhone’s Chinese regional success. The positives will always look shining and immaculate when you leave out the negatives, but Android still holds the largest marketshare for smartphones globally, another fact that Tim Cook most certainly didn’t bring up during the keynote.